Peter Swanson Quotes

The thing is, and maybe I'm biased by all those years I've spent in fictional realms built on deceit, I don't trust narrators any more than I trust the actual people in my life. We never get the whole truth, not from anybody. When we first meet someone, before words are ever spoken, there are already lies and half-truths. The clothes we wear cover the truth of our bodies. But they also present who we want to be to the world. They are fabrications, figuratively and literally.

Approaching forty, George felt as though his world had been slowly drained of all its colors. He'd passed that age when he could reasonably expect to fall madly in love with someone and raise a family, or to take the world by storm, or to have anything surprising lift him out of his day-to-day existence.

Strangers are just friends we haven't met yet.

any life at all is probably more than any of us deserves.

to go to bed, and that's when I saw him there,

Books are time travel. True readers all know this. But books don't just take you back to the time in which they were written; they can take you back to different versions of yourself.

I was born with a different kind of morality. The morality of an animal - of a crow or a fox or an owl - and not of a normal human being. I

he spent most days in a haze of disinterest.

Be Mindful of Death" (Memento Mori)

Truthfully, I don't think murder is necessarily as bad as people make it out to be. Everyone dies. What difference does it make if a few bad apples get pushed along a little sooner than God intended? And your wife, for example, seems like the kind worth killing.

I imagine she acted the way she thought you wanted to see her.

I know, right. I keep thinking

It was a beautiful spring night, the air rain-washed and smelling of crushed blossoms, and Henry felt as if the muscles of his body were singing in unison.

I tried to sleep, falling into a doze as thin as tissue paper,